Opinion

  Coming into this year, the hope was that supply chain improvements and modest interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve would return US economy to the healthy expansion mode it enjoyed in 2019. Accelerating inflation and anecdotes from companies suggest that’s much less likely to happen than it seemed a few months ago. The Fed is in a tight corner: ...

  An inflation hedge in deflation-prone Japan? At least that’s what Mitsui & Co. is preparing to offer via a coin that may be available as early as this month. According to Nikkei, the trading house is planning a cryptocurrency linked to the yen-denominated price of one gram of gold. Gold is a sideshow in the blockchain world. When it ...

Nvidia Corp.’s aborted attempt to buy British semiconductor company Arm Ltd. isn’t the only chip deal to fail at the hands of regulators, yet its high-profile defeat portends a tough outlook for mergers and acquisitions in what has become one of the world’s most politicised industries. GlobalWafers Co, a Taiwanese maker of sliced silicon upon which chips are produced, has ...

  Bloomberg columnists Justin Fox and Allison Schrager have each pointed out, it’s front-line and blue-collar workers — not office workers — who have been leaving their jobs at historically high rates. And even so, the quits rate is still only about 3%. And it’s a metric we’ve only tracked for about 20 years. But managers still need to remember: ...

  A further spike in US inflation — prices were 7.5% higher than a year ago, the fastest increase for 40 years — was the last the thing the Federal Reserve wanted to see as it weighed its next moves in monetary policy. It had led investors to expect a very gradual increase in interest rates starting next month. Already ...

  Good luck finding an industry hit as hard by the inflation and supply-chain upheaval as wind-turbine makers. Manufacturers like Vestas Wind Systems have been blown off course by a perfect storm of transport snarl-ups and surging freight and raw material costs. Instead of raking in profits on soaring demand for clean energy, the Danish firm is struggling just to ...

How to respond to climate change is often postulated as the central question of our time, and while that’s undeniably important, I have another nomination: How will we stop our new and often splendid technologies from being weaponised against us? I use the term weaponisation quite literally — drone attacks, cyberattacks, hostile uses of artificial intelligence, and attacks from space, ...

  The nationwide truckers’ protest in Canada, known as the “Freedom Convoy” and centered in Ottawa, reflects so many global trends that it’s hard to say what it means. But the movement may well end up as the most consequential story of the year. Under one plausible reading, many Canadians are exhausted by their government’s pandemic restrictions. The protests started ...

  A popular tenet of investing wisdom is to focus on the long-term. This is usually applied to quantitative methods of investing, such as considering historical 10- and 20-year returns of global asset classes rather that looking at what specific sectors or companies did last year, and what analysts guess they will do next year. A new report from the ...

  After the Republican National Committee censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and claimed that the Jan. 6 committee they’re serving on is persecuting people for “legitimate political discourse,” several Republican senators were quick to criticize their own party’s leadership. Most notably Utah’s Mitt Romney: “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth ...